An awareness based approach to sustainability
SAM4SN in decision-making
From this consideration , we can estimate the potential interest of such an indicator . Considering the STP an indicator of an emergent social norm toward sustainability could help in estimating “ if and how long after ” a given target will be reached .
STP and STPRA can help decision makers to establish which initial configuration of different types of agent leads to sustainability and the required number of committed agents to enable a social norm . To consider the initial commitment of agents as a constraint to reach an overall objective is an approach for several kind of campaigns or initiative based on social norm effects .
A decision maker can pivot on that idea , for example , with pilot programs to support group of people to become more proactive and committed on a given cause . On the opposite , he can evaluate that a strong initial commitment against such cause will counter any effort toward it .
In policy-making , it can be useful to distribute effort and resources in environmental sustainability programs , while for a utility company the STP can be valuable to predict trends of decrease in resource consumption .
SAM4SN has been developed to study the sustainability issues in terms of need to reduce the consumption of a limited resource . Sustainability is reached when a given overall goal of reduction is reached and we applied SAM4SN to the broad and popular area of household energy consumptions .
A further immediate opportunity is to apply SAM4S again in the context of household energy consumption , but in real environmental ICT-based policy programs from the beginning , allowing building a real dataset to initialize the model . In such kind of policy-based programs , the STP can be a useful tool for policy makers to understand , for example , the areas of a political intervention where to allocate more resources or fewer resources . The sustainability tipping point can give decision makers a support to understand if a sustainability social norm is emerging in a given area .
Continuing to stay in a household consumption field , SAM4SN is a suitable ABM to study other limited resource , as for example water consumption in domestic field . For utilities companies SAM4SN could be a tool to explore how and when to invest on smart metering functions development .
SAM4SN is a tool to explore and better understand the classes of phenomenon related to sustainability issues in terms of reduction of consumption of a limited resource in a broad sense . The basic elements that are mandatory to apply the SAM4SN approach in sustainability issues in any contexts are :
• The limited resource to be reduced ;
• The reference institution where the resource is used and where specific awareness can spread ;
• The limiting factor on which to play
SAM4SN can be used as a virtual laboratory where to perform experiments on such mechanisms and concepts . Acknowledging consumers as truly actives entails that they can take part in the construction of the solution . A direct recommendation is then to allow consumers to have unrestricted access to their own consumption data . A further recommendation is to allow them , on a voluntary basis , to relax some privacybased constraints toward a dimension of
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